Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Faction management, isn't it the main and central thing of this game? Or wait, shouldn't it be? After all it's common knowledge, that it's been called Faction Mod from the beginning. And one of the first thing implemented, was that 'handy' faction terminal that allowed you to invite other players to the base, build structures of your gang, store data about outer world (other players).

But it has not worked as expected, and many things changed since then. First and foremost, it was build around the standard dialog interface functionality, due to the limitations that was imposed during that time. Because of that, managing faction became tedious and annoying task. Also, it turned out that players do not need all those functionality - not always they need to have four ranks for their members, sometimes maybe they would like to have more than one leader, maybe they would also like to have their radio channel changing randomly automatically. Maybe they also would like to have customized messaging system, in which everyone could post a message on the terminal, to be later read by others. Lots of possibilities, but the main issue was usability. That meant it required changes, or even complete overhaul.

Lots of time has passed, and the engine has grown up to the point almost everything is possible (with varying amount of work). But still, we have not improved that core functionality - chasing other stuff, or simply because of lack of time.

I started to think about the changes quite time ago, and wanted also to expose that stuff to the world by providing web interface for players (along with account management). First, I wanted to put emphasis on that, so that once registered playername always belong to some account, and it cannot be taken after wipe. And on top of that, I wanted to reimplement the very same functionality we've got in faction terminal, but also expose it to the web interface and store data in some persistent, wipe-safe storage (SQL database to be precise).

I started implementing it, but soon I realized it needs some amount of customization, otherwise it might just fail the same way as old system did - providing some useless functionality, being used only partially etc. Of course, I began to think how to inject some flexibility into it - that seemed to be lot of work. Then I stumbled upon something, that entirely changed my ideas and made me to start implementing it almost from a scratch again.

To those interested, CouchDB is non-relational database, that allows you to store your data in form of documents in JSON format (Javascript Object Notation). That means - no relations, only documents. Hey - that sounds good, after all, faction terminal is just a database where you store documents, right? In traditional SQL approach, you would have something like:

table Factionstable Players

connected with relation 1 to many. Then, if you want to fetch all players records stored in faction A, you need to join those 2 tables to prepare output records. Oh nice, this is what the world is doing since ages, it works. But why to impose such rigidness on that, in non-relational database, you would just create database for faction A, and store documents about players there. Nice!

But that's not all. It turned out that CouchDB, because of the fact its protocol is HTTP, is able to serve HTML (and other HTTP content) directly. So I can build web interface (web application) in it, no need for additional tier, no need for additional dependencies. Great? Yeah, I started to love it.

Now, another surprise - it's designed in a way, that each web application is stored in some database, right? And previously, we stated that we will do it the way that each faction would have its own database. That means, each faction could have its own, fully customized web interface (of course, default one is gonna be provided). And it requires only HTML + Javascript knowledge.

Ok, that all sounds fine, but also it feels a bit dangerous. We are allowing players to store the data they want, and we also want to server (gameworld) react to it in proper way. So we need some way of communication, between CouchDB and FOnline server. Seems hard, but part of it already works.

Hopefully, this is the first part of the series about new factions interface. Please note, that's not yet stated when it's gonna be finalized and introduced. To my excuse, I've got real reasons why it's taking so long:)

In next post we will dissect how it might work and how the data will be synchronized, or maybe I'm gonna throw in some technical details, just for fun.

Donate!

We are working in our free time on FOnline, we don't get paid and FOnline will never become pay-to-play. But running the server costs money. So, if you like the game and would like to support us, we would be very happy if you could donate some money to keep the server running.

Amount:

Currency in:

Powered by Online Quest.

About

"FOnline: 2238" is a Fallout game based on the FOnline engine. Currently, it is only available in English.

The game is set in 2238, 3 years before Fallout 2. The world has been expanded and includes both the Fallout and Fallout 2 game areas.